Fort Myers Beach Elementary partners with Mound House to increase student enrollment

Fort Myers Beach has endured the challenges and roadblocks in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian.

Now, the beach community continues its recovery process by building back better and stronger than before.

From local businesses, homes, and schools, one of Lee County’s top beach schools, Fort Myers Beach Elementary, has endured much post-Ian.

Fort Myers Beach Elementary was left in destruction after Hurricane Ian.

With community support and proper funding, they report the school from the back of the guard up.

The next task is to increase student enrollment. Rob Spicker, Assistant Director of media Relations and public Information with Lee County Schools, says enrollment has risen slightly from last year.

Currently, 63 elementary students attend Fort Myers Beach Elementary School.   

Spicker says that in order to increase that number, He and the school district decided to develop an innovation that focuses on student engagement, science, engineering, and community partnership.

“To get students excited about coming out to the beach school is to introduce all these new programs to these students,” said Spicker. This partnership with the mound house is one of those initiatives.” 

It’s a first-of-kind partnership and opportunity for educators like Ashley Szumski, who gets to teach students in unique ways about how the Calusa Indian mound was developed.

“The Calusa, the indigenous people who were out throughout or through, lived throughout southwest Florida, really are a crucial part of the local history here,” said Szumski.

Through in-class and out of learning, students K-2nd got a chance to get their hands dirty while also learning about archaeological resources connected to one of Florida’s historical past.

“We got to really investigate a lot of the natural resources, talk about how things are made, and kind of using our imaginations and what we could create with some of the things that we find around us,” said Szumski. The resources that we found today were used to create different resources here that would have been used in everyday life.”

With this new initiative beginning on good educational note.

Spicker says they plan to further expand it by partnering with schools like FGCU and others to expand students’ knowledge and interest in engineering and science.

“This will continue to attract students to come to the beach school that don’t necessarily live on the island, but want to be involved in these kind of environmental and science programs,” said Spicker.